Tiny Treats to Pass the Time

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June 29, 2023

Spaceship 01

I’ve been playing around with these space ships made out of simple shapes, many in sketch form, but I thought I would try one in 3D. How hard could it be? Well, I would find out that my 3D knowledge is still very rudimentary. The music is a brief chorus from Britten’s Billy Budd, which I discovered in Claire Denis’ film, Beau Travail.

June 29, 2023
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June 24, 2023

Train

Went for a bike ride and got stopped by a train. I waited and thought I would film it. Long train.

June 24, 2023
June 23, 2023

Circles Part 1

I wanted to riff on the idea of some very simple premise to start with and see what kind of progression I could create, and so I thought, circles are very simple and easy to mess around with. I got as far as this storyboard exploration and the energy sort of petered out. I may pick this one up again in the future, but for now, this quick little exploration is the extent of this post....

June 23, 2023
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June 20, 2023

Ten

This began as a simple thought experiment which went something like, can I create any sort of story like movement with a simple count up from one to ten? I decided to keep any animation extremely basic and try to create any effects just with the numbers themselves and the way they were laid out. When I was done with the overall animation, I added sound. I’m not sure there is anything like a “story” here, but I am interested in the ways that sound added so much to this piece....

June 20, 2023
June 18, 2023

Haircut

More heads in glass containers for your Sunday pleasure. I’m starting to explore how to manipulate simple shapes a bit more to add some character to the elements. Just pushing the elements a little bit, ways to give the mouth more expressive qualities, and the nose was made with metaballs which are also new to me.

June 18, 2023
June 17, 2023

Quicksand

Just a quick little scene exploring the ways that super simple shapes can create an image.

June 17, 2023
June 16, 2023

Astronauts

I started out playing around with a basic head shape, wanting to see about those teeth from yesterday’s sketch. A couple of happy accidents later and this is the result.

June 16, 2023
June 15, 2023

The Smile

Doodling one day, I had this idea for a face, emerging from behind opening doors and all you could see was teeth. I thought, well let’s try this in 3D and see how that goes. I don’t think this quite captures what I wanted to do yet, so I may give this another go tomorrow and see if I can make an improvement.

June 15, 2023
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June 14, 2023

Bathers

I had done this little sketch of these two little dudes in a kind of wooden barrel bathtub and thought it might be a good candidate for a little 3D experimentation. Once I had the modelling done, I thought, well, what about a simple camera move from one side to the other, which then suggested (don’t as me why) to me this idea of a ship’s hull creaking. And so, I pulled it together and this is the result....

June 14, 2023
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June 13, 2023

Forest Creatures Part 2

For today’s entry, I took the image from yesterday’s exploration and gave it a little camera movement and added in sound sound to give it some atmosphere. It was my first time rendering out a very simple animation in Blender, and it turned out to be easier than I thought, though it took about a minute per frame to render. I’ll have to learn a thing or two about how to optimize renders....

June 13, 2023